


Red Sky in the Morning

by juniperwick



Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Animal Death, Brotherly Affection, Durincest if you squint, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Naked Dwarves, Pre-Quest, Tickling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 05:25:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperwick/pseuds/juniperwick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year in the life of Fíli and Kíli. Includes work, ale, memories, work, injuries, sheep, work, sex, fighting and more work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to this ridiculous fic I now know more about smithing, lambing, wildflowers and Saxon villages than I ever thought I would. Thanks, boys.

### 1.

That unseasonably warm spring saw an outpouring of young dwarves from the Blue Mountains. In the deep of the mines, those dwarves who could get the work toiled. From the black heart of the mountain the countless pickaxes sung against the rock. It was a high, unrelenting note: an ancient song, and simple. Metal on stone, deeper and more intrinsic than a heartbeat. 

The dwarves that worked in the mountain stayed; in shifts they went to work chipping at the bowels of the earth, in shifts they set down their pickaxes and, limp-muscled, went back and fell into their beds. But for any dwarf who couldn't secure a coveted mining job, the open air and the wide world was better than a family going hungry, or the slow, sad dwindling of heirlooms.

For Fíli and Kíli, it was no different than for most of the young dwarves of Ered Luin: trudging down from the mountains when the weather turned warm, into the world of men. They were still young enough to secretly relish the role of seasoned tramp. But they were used enough to walking, days upon days of one foot in front of the other, hour after hour, dreaming of the luxury of ponies.

“If we had ponies,” Kíli said, for the tenth time that week, “we'd go five times the speed we go now. Think how far we could go! If we had ponies, we'd be unstoppable.”

“If we had ponies, we'd have two more mouths to feed, and it would seem like ten more,” Fíli said. He shrugged his pack back onto his shoulders. In truth, he didn't know how much ponies ate. He remembered having ponies once, in the dim, distant days of his dwarrowhood; but all he recalled was how tall they had seemed, and his wariness of their iron-shod hooves.

Behind him, Kíli quickened his steps to keep up. “I'm not saying we should. I'm only saying – just think how sweet it would be, to have them!”

Fíli shook his head, eyes on the far green horizon. “I don't want to think. It doesn't help.”

The ground they travelled over jagged and bucked, full of shaggy tufts and hidden holes ready to catch a foot and turn an ankle. They passed by dark patches of pine woods. They travelled northeasterly, away from the hobbitland, where they'd get no work, and away from the great silver sea. 

They had fought about which way to go, of course. Not fought, not really; but squabbled, like chaffinches on a twig. Fíli had got his way when he shot a hare on the leap in a meadow – the arrow caught it mid-air, a shining silhouette in the dawn. A spectacular shot, even Kíli, stubbornly fond of his own bow, had to admit. It was the best kill so far (and since), and it won minor bragging rights and a thin skin of authority. Fíli used it to point them in the direction he wanted to go. Kíli, grudgingly, knuckled under.

That had been almost a week ago. Since then, they had walked. They followed their feet; then game trails; then paths; then roads. There were hamlets and little villages along the roads; rarely, a town. They all belonged to men, of course. At every stop along the way they enquired: _Was there work to be had? Smithing? Farriery? Fighting for hire?_ They would have stopped to ask at two sticks leant against one another, had they come across it. But there was no work. There was either nothing to be done or the job had already been taken, by a man or by another itinerant dwarf. So they walked on.

They walked in comfortable silence or talked of the little they had to talk of that they hadn't already worn down with conversation, or one or the other or both of them sung to pass the time. They sung old songs and new: songs about gold, songs about the bone-deep ring of iron on stone or steel on steel, about their legendary uncle, about scarce, precious women, and – only when the dark ringed their campfire at night and chill raised goosebumps on their skin – songs about dragons. (And if it was dragons, then, when the fire had burned out and only the embers glowed cool amid the ashes and everything around was darkness and cold and strange animal sounds, Fíli would find that somehow his little brother's bedroll must have been laid closer than he had thought, and he had to sleep the night with Kíli crowding his furs. In the morning, of course, everything would be how it was again.)

So it was singing – the both of them – that they crested a rise of scrubby grassland and saw, below them, scattered across the road, a town; a settlement of twenty or more houses. The sunlight gilded the thatched rooves and caught the edges of the stones that made the houses. It caught the little faces of the people, and the sheep scattered over the hills beyond the town.

“Look!” Kíli grabbed his brother's shoulder. Something that might become a smile threatened his face. “We have to ask here, Fíli – there's bound to be work here!”

Fíli felt something inside him clench. There would be no work here, he felt sure. “We'll ask,” he said, guardedly, “but heaven knows if we really want to stay here. It's so remote. And look at the fields – bound to be sheep-shaggers, all.”

“Come on.” Kíli started down the road toward the town. He glanced back, eyes alive with hope. “We have to try.”

Fíli followed. Kíli was right. They had to try.

… 

“We do, as it happens.”

Fíli blinked. “I'm sorry?”

The blacksmith laughed, throwing back his head and bellowing to the sky. “Don't apologise, lad! I can't say you're exactly what I'm looking for, but you'll do!”

Kíli started forward, expression intense. “Can you take both of us? You have to take both of us.”

“I do, do I?” The blacksmith was a big man. All his size was in his shoulders – he couldn't help but loom, especially over a pair of dwarves. “Well. You're each about half the size of a man I'd be looking for, so I suppose the both of you might just make one whole. I can take both of you, right enough.”

Kíli turned to Fíli, face alive with delight. “You heard him?” He took his brother's shoulder, gave it a little shake. “You heard him? He can take both of us!”

Fíli stared at him. The thing inside him had begun to open its fingers, at last. “I heard him,” he said. Without his permission, a grin began to bloom on his face. “I heard him! We're in a job, brother!” He turned to the blacksmith and stuck out his hand. “We'll take you up on that, mate, if that's all right by you.”

The smith's hand engulfed Fíli's. It was one straightforward shake, up and down; and the same for Kíli. His mouth quirked up into a smile that crinkled his eyes. “Right then, lads. You ready to work?”

…

That evening, the smith introduced them to the town's only inn. It was a small town's inn: an inn that filled up in the evenings with working men. Hard-muscled, work-stained men who smelled of sweat and beer; men with careless ugliness who grinned without a full set of teeth and shouted and catcalled the serving women. Superstitious, suspicious men.

The inn hushed as they came in. It was a bubbling quiet, full of elbows and curious looks. The smith bought Fíli and Kíli a mug of ale each, and the quiet began to drain away. When the noise resumed, gradually swelling back to full strength, it was punctuated by overloud exclamations followed by shushed silences. After an hour, the dwarves became aware of some muttering.

The first time, Fíli had stood from his seat at the bench and tried to look the mutterer in the eye. (The man was two foot taller than him, which made it difficult, but not impossible.) Kíli rose, instinctively, beside his brother.

“What did you just say?” Fíli tilted his head at an angle that (he hoped) was eloquent of casual menace.

The man stumbled a little, surprised to find this little man suddenly in his path. Ale slopped from his mug. He squinted at Fíli. “I didn't say nothing to _you_ ,” he said, over-emphasising every word.

Fíli's lips curled, though not in a smile. “I heard you say something that I'm interested to hear again. Do me the honour.”

The man considered. It was an ugly process. At last, he seemed to come to a decision, and looked Fíli in the eye again. He leaned down, to better spit into Fíli's face. “I said,” he said, wetly, “you and your little mate – ” at this he jabbed a finger at Kíli, “ – are ill luck, and you'd better clear out of this town before you get some bad fortune of your own. Some more, that is.” He chuckled at this last, deep and throaty.

When the man had aimed his finger at Kíli, Fíli had reached behind him to put his hand on Kíli's sword arm; he had felt his brother start against him, then hold. Fíli let go, now. His hands balled into fists at his sides.

Behind him, the smith rose. He loomed effortlessly, even over the other man. “Now, now, Saul. You know how you get when you've got some in you.”

Without glancing back, Fíli took a step forward. He could smell the man now – ale and sweat and the animal stink of sheep – and had to crook his neck further to look him in the face. “No. I applaud the man for his honesty. If someone's got something to say, I prefer that they say it.” He let a smile spread across his face. “Better out than in, eh, Saul?” Still smiling, he punched the man in the stomach.

Saul folded like a piece of paper, and went down easy onto the floor. Fíli smirked, smug despite himself, when a whimpering from behind him made him turn. The man's companion was crumpling, too, face creased and plum-coloured. Kíli turned a saint-like face to him. “You should watch your back,” he said, “or else what are you going to do when I'm not here to take care of you?”

Fíli was halfway through a grin when something utterly unexpected struck him in the jaw and he went very suddenly and very soundly to sleep.

When he resurfaced, it was slowly. He shivered up through darkness like a bubble under ice. The light was dim and thready when he at last came to. It hurt his head to open his eyes.

The first thing he recognised was his brother's face. When Fíli blinked and tried to squint up at him, Kíli slapped him gently on the cheek. He was saying something. He raised his hands to try and bat his brother off him.

“Oi! Get off!” Kíli caught his hands and held them. “I'm trying to wake you up, you idiot.”

Fíli extracted one of his hands from Kíli's and put it to his throbbing jaw. The bone was tender, and swollen and hard under his fingers. Swiping Kíli's well-meaning hands off him, he rolled and sat up with an effort that dragged a groan from him.

He was beside the forge, bathed in its benevolent heat. The rest of the shop was in darkness. He passed a hand across his eyes. “What happened?”

He heard Kíli shift beside him. There was a weighted pause; then Kíli said, in a rush, “I'm sorry, brother, I really am; I didn't see, I didn't know what he was going to do and then it was too late and I didn't know what to do but follow.”

Fíli looked up. Kíli gazed at him with his dark brows drawn down and his mouth all troubled. Fíli, hand to his jaw, scowled a question at him. Then someone spoke from behind him.

“Don't blame your brother,” the smith said. “I took him by surprise as much as you. Little fool pulled a sword on me! I ask you. Pity for him it was blunt as a butterknife or I'd have had to do some quick thinking.” Cloaked by shadow, he perched on an anvil and grinned with his gappy teeth. “Don't you lads know you don't pull a weapon in a bar fight?”

Straightening, Fíli's hand went to his back. He found his sword still there, and let his hand rest, full of meaning, on the pommel. “You,” he growled. “It was you knocked me out.”

The smith held out his hands, palm forward. “Hold it against me if you must. I only did it for the best.”

“The best?” Fíli was already climbing to his feet. Beside him, Kíli matched his motion; until a flurry of dizziness swept through Fíli's head like weather and he staggered. Kíli caught him before he could fall, held him upright.

“I promise you it was for the best. That idiot Saul?” The smith spread his hands. “He wouldn't have backed down, not in the face of a pair of dwarves. Nor would I, in his position. You'd have fought, and maybe even killed him. Every man jack in that inn would have backed him. You'd have been run out of town.”

The following silence was filled only with the sounds of their breathing, and the slumbrous noises of embers in the forge. Fíli, holding onto his brother, glared at the smith. “Maybe,” he said at last, “it would be better if we did just that. There's plenty of things we can do. We'll find work somewhere else.” He ground out every word through his teeth. He felt Kíli look at him, sharp-eyed; but he didn't turn his head.

The smith stood from the anvil. He rose up like a troll, a good three foot taller than either of them. They had to tilt their heads to look up at him. 

“Don't be fools,” the smith said. “There's no need for wounded pride or haughtiness. You need the work; I need the help. It was only a little disagreement. Soon be mended, provided no one goes making a bigger fuss than needs be.” He shrugged his massive shoulders – it was like boulders shifting. “That's if you want my advice, anyhow.” The smith turned away and threw, over his shoulder, “I'll let you sleep now. Do whatever you've got to, just don't go murdering anybody over a mistimed word.” His massive figure was silhouetted in the moonlight at the door for a moment than was gone.

Fíli let his hand fall from his sword and, letting go of his brother, sat abruptly down again. He cupped his aching jaw and glared into the glow of forge. Kíli knelt beside him. The silence strung out between them, crowded with the memory of ugly mutterings. Ill luck. They had meant dwarf-kind was unlucky, for themselves and those around them; that dwarves called down dragons and got everyone killed.

Finally, reaching out a hand, Kíli touched his brother oh so carefully upon the wrist. “Fíli,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

Fíli shook his head – not to say no to anything, but just to do something with his helpless emotions. He regretted it immediately. The smithy wheeled around him. Grimacing, he probed his jaw with cautious fingers. As he did, he spoke. “He talks as if it were nothing.” He glared into the remains of the fire, waiting for the room to settle again. “As if our pride and our dignity were less than the coin we earn working for him.”

“I'm sorry I didn't stop him.” Kíli looked down at his hands. “He was right: my sword is blunt.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “I won't let it happen again.”

Fíli sighed. He stopped examining his injury and gave Kíli's shoulder a shake. “He didn't kill me. He only knocked me out. You're not to go hacking to bits everyone who ever gave me a tap.”

Without looking up, Kíli punched his brother solidly, gently in the ribs. Fíli ruffled his hair, smiling lopsidedly despite himself. The smile flared and died quickly. 

“I don't know that there's anything we can do,” he said, the weight of it settling on his heart. “No.” He lifted his chin. He was almost sure the pain in his jaw was already fading. At least, that's what he would tell himself – and Kíli. “No, it was nothing at all.” He clambered to his feet again, and this time was ready for the little spell of dizziness that flurried about him. 

Kíli watched him with narrowed eyes. “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Fíli said, firmly. “Now, we should be sleeping.”

Kíli leapt to his feet and, before Fíli could move to help him, laid out both their bedrolls on the warm flags beside the forge. In the near dark, Kíli bundled rags for a pillow for Fíli's battered head, and then leant hard thrice, four, five times on the enormous bellows to liven the fire. Fíli took his time unbuckling his swordbelt and unlacing his boots with uncooperative fingers. At last, swaying on his feet, he fell more than lay down onto his blanket and his tatty pillow. Cross-legged, Kíli sat beside him.

“Folks will want to hear all about this tale,” he said, voice soft. Fíli quirked an eyebrow. “About how a common man felled the great Thorin's heir.” Kíli's voice lilted – with mirth or uncertainty, Fíli couldn't tell.

He replied from his pillow, muffled. “Mind you keep in the bit where he's a six foot blacksmith.”

Kíli smiled a wavering smile. “We'll see which version folks prefer. Now go to sleep.”

The dark was stealing up on Fíli. His eyelids fell closed. With an effort, he reached out a hand to roughly pat his brother's knee – a gesture which, words unnecessary, meant you sleep too. Then his hand slid to the floor and he was asleep once more.

…

When they woke hours later – Fíli with a headache and a purple bruise on his swollen chin; Kíli still sitting with his back against the stone of the forge – there were no words. They worked the day out, sharing a sullen silence that the smith, on his return, was wise enough not to disturb. Then, when the sky was golden and birds were trilling and shouting the end of the day and the shop was tidied and swept to within an inch of sanity, they shrugged their jerkins on and followed, with dragging feet, the smith across the road to the inn.

Saul was there. Fíli looked for him the moment he was through the door. He was there, on a bench between his mates, ale in hand. Even as the smith glanced back with tense shoulders, Fíli met Saul's eyes. Behind him, he felt Kíli step up to his shoulder. The smith put one massive hand on Fíli's chest, warning; Fíli shoved it away. The noise of the inn ebbed.

At his bench, Saul's eyes slid away from Fíli's glare and he looked away, to stab at a chunk of cheese on the table. The smith dropped his hand and muttered something to himself, and took his place on a bench. Fíli, after another moment – a moment wherein he felt the eyes of half the inn turn on him like fire-heat – followed him.

Kíli dropped onto a bench across the table from his brother. The smith, apologetically, bought them ale and they drank it in silence. There were no more mutterings about ill luck.

That would return tomorrow.

…

They settled into a routine quickly enough. It wasn't, after all, their first summer out of the Blue Mountains. From the twilight before dawn, when the sky and land was all sapphire blue, to the ruby sunset they worked at the forge in the sweltering, shimmering heat. When it was dark they let the forge breathe its fire out and cool, and they crossed the road between the stone and thatch houses to the inn. At the inn, then, until the evening died down and they would recross the road, arms 'round one another and breath ripe with ale, staggering only a little, and bed down in the shop beside the forge, now pleasantly warm. In the morning they would rise again before dawn.

On Sundays, the men of the town didn't work. The sheep were tended, but the inn was half-full all day, and the smithy lay quiet. The smith spent the day doing his own things, and so, once a week, the brothers had a day off.

The hills above the town were lush with pine forest – thence came the wolves that every so often took sheep in the night – and it was there that they headed in the dewy summer morning. Through the unaccustomed hush of the sleeping town, through the close-cropped sheep pastures, and into the cool quiet beneath the pines. It was only when they were amongst the trees that they filled their lungs with the clean air and at last began to sing, and argue, and laugh.

It was two hours' walk through the hill country, climbing rocks and jumping little canyons, splashing through swift-running streams. They had found the place by aimlessly walking one day, and returned to it each week with a wordless understanding. The two hours eased the week's weight off Fíli's shoulders, and he was glad to feel it go; and the further they got from civilisation, the more easily the smile came to Kíli's face. The scowl Kíli wore so often in the week made Fíli's fists clench on whatever tool he was holding. He had to pause, periodically, to work the cramp out of his hands. (In fact, unhappy, Kíli looked a little too much like their uncle for comfort, which was not a thought Fíli had articulated to himself yet. But then again, they didn't see their uncle very much.)

Two hours' walk brought them to an opening in the trees.

By the banks of a deep, clear river, where the trees pulled back to leave the ground grassy and studded with wildflowers in bright yellow and lilac and sky blue, there had once been a town made of stone. Now all that remained were the tumbledown, ankle high remains of walls patchy with lichen, and a stone figure on a dais, four times the height of a dwarf. Any features it might once have had were long worn away. The stone guardian watched over the river and the meadow his once-town had become.

At the blooming of the river-light through the trees, Kíli whooped and sprinted forward, unlacing his jerkin on the run. Fíli grinned, shouldered his pack more firmly and set off after him at a jog. 

The light as they breached the edge of the river clearing was like a benediction. Fíli threw his head back, stumbling to a halt. Somewhere ahead of him, Kíli laughed. Tossing his pack down, Fíli writhed out of his clothes – stubborn knots and heavy leather – and ran for the bank. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kíli doing the same – but stuck fighting with laces that wouldn't unlace. Fíli picked up his pace to outflank him.

He reached the bank, and in one long motion leapt out over the river. He seemed to hang in the air for a glorious moment, the sun on his bare skin, triumphant, having beaten his brother – and then the river hit him like something from another world and took his breath away.

It was bone-achingly cold, even under the summer sun. Fíli kicked against the smooth stones on the riverbed and broke the surface again, gasping and shaking his hair like a dog. The water flew, sparkling like gems in the sunlight. On the green bank, Kíli at last staggered out of his clothes and fell more than jumped into the water. When he came up, spitting water and blinking, Fíli was still crippled with laughter. He couldn't stop – so much so that he was powerless to resist when Kíli crossed the distance between him in a few short strokes and leapt on top of him, ducking him under the surface again.

They played in the water like dwarrows – racing, splashing, wrestling – until they were exhausted. Fíli was the first to climb out, grabbing roots and handfuls of grass to pull himself onto the bank, when the sun was just overtopping its zenith. It was warm as a hearthfire on his wet skin. Wringing out his hair over his shoulder, Fíli left his clothes where they lay in the grass and crossed the little ruined village to where the inscrutable stone man stood on his dais. Fíli climbed onto the wide dais and lay down on the sun-warmed stone, stretching his limbs like a cat.

After a minute, Kíli joined him. He lay beside his brother, and they both squinted up at the bright burnished sky. They were content enough to lie, for the moment, in the sound of each others' breathing and the birdsong from the fringes of the forest. After a long while, Fíli sat up, muscles full of a pleasant ache, and set about loosing the braids in his damp hair.

Kíli, remaining where he was, threw an arm across his eyes to shade them from the sun. After a few moments more of companionable silence, Kíli said, “Do you know what?”

Setting his silver aiglets in a row on the stone beside him, Fíli said, “What?

Rolling onto his side, languid as a cat, Kíli fixed his eyes on his brother. “I like the sun.”

Fíli combed out his hair and his moustache with his fingers into wet strands, and lay back again with a sigh. He closed his eyes, and waited for his brother to speak again.

It was a moment before Kíli did. “I don't think,” he began, leaning on an elbow, “that I'd like to stay underground my whole life. Not getting to walk about and feel the wind on your face. Not getting to lie in the sun on a summer's day, like this.”

“Mm.” Fíli didn't open his eyes.

There was another long pause. “You know what our uncle says,” he said at last. “That if we hadn't lost Erebor, we'd be rich, and happy. We wouldn't have to work or leave the mountain at all.”

“We'd be royalty,” Fíli said, opening his eyes at last and squinting in the light. 

Kíli was tracing a pattern on the stone with his fingertips. Not looking up from it, he said, “I don't know if I'd like that.”

“You say that now,” Fíli said, pillowing his arms behind his head. “But think: we could have any ponies we wanted. We could eat and drink all day. Our mother could have anything her heart desired.” He chuckled. “D'you know, I can just see you as a spoiled little prince.” He closed his eyes again, smiling. “You're enough of a brat as it is.” 

He was expecting retaliation, so when Kíli punched him in the ribs he only curled into it and grabbed for his little brother. He caught him around the waist and, as Kíli struggled, found the old familiar spots and tickled mercilessly. Kíli yelped and bucked in his grip, but Fíli held on and didn't let go until he had tickled his brother into submission.

At last they flopped back onto the hot stone, panting and giggling. When he had got his breath back, Kíli said, “I wouldn't mind that not having to work bit, mind you.”

Fíli reached out a hand and oh so delicately just brushed Kíli's side with his fingertips, cracking up when his brother gasped and squirmed away. He accepted the punch in the shoulder he got for that with good grace.

The sun seemed to hang in the sky as if it had nowhere else to be, so on the stone dais they stretched out under it, the heat beating them like a fuller on hot steel, until they dozed, gold and dark side by side.

When they woke again, the light was heavy amber and despite the evening warmth there was a colder breeze blowing. They climbed down from the cooling plinth, where the shadow of the featureless statue had shifted to threaten their sleeping place, and found their clothes where they had left them in the grass. Fíli caught a fish with a line tied around his wrist and cast into the river; while Kíli shot nothing at all with his bow and took longer than he should have to strike a fire because of his annoyance. They cooked the fish in chunks on sharp sticks, hands a-glitter with silver scales, and ate it recalling good memories to one another, and joking about the bad habits of the town men. After that, they smoked, and the talk grew mellower, and they competed over who could blow the best smoke rings, and kept falling on one another laughing for no reason.

When a perfect smoke ring – smooth and even and greyer than grey – rose up and up into the pale sky and at last encircled a star – still barely there yet – they both fell quiet. Finally, Fíli sighed and rose on unwilling legs. “Time to go.” As he spoke, he uncorked his waterskin and doused the fire. It hissed and spat and billowed black smoke that stung his eyes, and in some small part of himself Fíli was glad, because it meant he didn't have to see his little brother's stricken face.

They gathered their things, and packed their packs, and refilled their skins. At the edge of the pine forest, they paused, and looked back. 

The river, rushing between its green banks, was dark now, no longer made of crystals; and the once-village was full of long shadows. The longest was thrown by the featureless statue. The hollows where his eyes must once have been were full of darkness. A thread of smoke still rose from the remains of their campfire. Fíli shrugged off a shiver and gripped his brother's shoulder for a moment. As he set off into the dim pine forest, Kíli turned away too and followed him. 

…

So it went on, week piling upon week. The most distant days slipped away beneath the weight of time, until, in the stretch and heave of blacksmithing and the hearthside nights in the inn, it seemed to the idle mind as if they had been there from time immemorial. The pair of dwarves at the smithy became a fixture. They traded remarks with the townsfolk, enquired of their health and were enquired of in turn, talked of the small happenings that became news in places where bad things didn't happen. They dreamed of news of orc parties spotted in the forest or the grasslands, or wolves a little too big for comfort, but knew enough not to expect it.

When the drink was flowing and conversation unbridled, they were still ill luck and dragon-bait; but the talk was casual now and not malicious. They didn't rise to it again.

Midsummer rushed up at them – the longest day, and a warm evening when the town was strung with faded bunting and the inn was packed and raucous. The spirit of general goodwill was infectious, so when Fíli and Kíli were challenged to a drinking contest by some of the boys that had been known to hang about with Saul, the brothers cheerfully took them up on the offer. Later on, when Saul's boys were under the table and everything was warm and bright, Fíli and Kíli danced in turns with a girl with a broad grin, enormous breasts and soft brown hair braided with blue speedwell flowers. Still later, since they had nowhere else to go, she took them out to the sheep pastures on the hill and they groped and fumbled in the grass under the stars. She kissed them both with her wide, warm mouth and they were all hands and uncertainty. She showed them what to do, and they both took her, in turns, while the other watched. _We do everything together_ , they had told her.

When they woke the next morning, the light was like a pickaxe to the skull and they were covered in grass stains; and there was no need for them to talk about what had happened, so they didn't.


	2. Chapter 2

### 2.

After midsummer, the season took on a downhill gradient, and the days tumbled, one after the other, toward autumn. The mornings were clear and horizonless; the evenings sultry. The smith worked stripped to the waist and Fíli and Kíli followed suit, sweat-slick and damp-haired. The townsfolk talked about storms coming to break the heat like people anticipating the arrival of an important guest. But if thunder threatened, it muttered from a distance, and didn't come close enough to assuage the overheated land.

That is, until one late summer Sunday.

When they had set off that morning, the heat had been close and sticky, and there was no wind in the pine woods. Walking, they didn't speak much, except to complain about the weather. When they got to the place that had once been a village, a bad-tempered rain was falling in fits and starts over the open ground. Fíli walked out into it. He threw down his pack and fell to his knees, pulling his tunic off over his head and baring his shoulders to the rain. The air moved against his skin, chilling his sweat; and the rain ran down over his shoulders and his back, down his neck and into the thatch of hair on his chest and belly. He sighed.

There was a _ploosh_ sound, and Fíli looked up. His brother was nowhere to be seen.

Rising, Fíli left his things were they lay and went to the riverbank. At first he saw nothing but dark water, rushing between the banks. The river had risen since they had last visited: it was swollen and faster than he remembered. Then, as he stared, Kíli's head broke the surface, dark hair plastered to his skull. Paddling against the current, he grinned up at Fíli.

Fíli left him to it. Unbuckling and unlacing as he went, Fíli went to the statue of the featureless man and climbed onto his dais, to lie on the cool stone in his underthings and feel the rain pitter patter on his too-warm skin. After a while, he heard Kíli climb out of the river. Then, nothing; until a deeper shadow fell over him. Fíli had time to open his eyes to see his brother standing between him and the sky, before Kíli shook himself like a dog and Fíli was showered with stingingly cold wet drops. He threw up and arm and rolled away, reflexively. As he did, the stone dropped away beneath him; he had been lying close to the edge. It was only a drop of a few feet, but Fíli hit the ground hard. It knocked all the air out of him. He rolled over, struggling to breathe again, and saw Kíli, standing on the dais, doubled up with laughter.

Fíli gulped a lungful of air, and shouted, “You idiot! What did you do that for?” He sounded too breathy for conviction. Kíli sat down hard, clutching himself and laughing like a brook. 

Fíli levered himself up on one arm, with the other clutching his ribs. Breathing was still an effort. “You sound like a warg when you laugh, you know that?”

Kíli, who had subsided into a fit of giggles and had his face buried in his hands, didn't reply; so Fíli climbed to his feet and went to find his clothes. The wind had gotten up. It played with his hair, tossing golden strands here and there. 

As he was pulling his tunic the right way out again, he heard Kíli come bounding up behind him.

“Come on!” Kíli said, still bubbling with laughter. “You can't tell me that wasn't funny!”

“Not from where I'm standing,” Fíli growled over his shoulder. 

Kíli went quiet, laughter dying away. An arm of rain swept across them, dashing their faces and drumming upon the ground, before it softened. “Fine,” Kíli said. He turned and strode away, back across the the grass toward the statue.

Fíli yanked his tunic down over his head. “And put some clothes on before you freeze!” He called over his shoulder. The rain swept over him again, wind-driven, and Fíli hurried into the rest of his clothes.

After he was dressed, Fíli tied his habitual fishing lines to a tree that stood close by to the river, and let the water take the fine silver hooks in its fierce current. He went to the statue's plinth and squatted in its lee to strike a fire – but the wind was too changeable. It whirled around the corners, throwing rain into his face and teasing his hair into knots, sending the brown fallen needles under the trees eddying and dancing around and around. At last Fíli threw down his flint into the useless kindling and stood.

As he did, thunder broke and crashed overhead.

Fíli flinched, hand instinctively – senselessly – on the hilt of his knife, as it snarled like a rockfall in the bruise-coloured sky. The noise was cacophonous, so loud it seemed to have a physical presence. Fíli's eyes darted about the meadow, searching.

Kíli stood by the trees, frozen where he stood, wide-eyed. He had a long pine branch in his hand, and a knife in the other, with which he had been stripping the bark. His eyes found Fíli's, and they held each other's gaze across the meadow, as the rain fell and the roll of thunder subsided at last. Only when it was quiet did a smile tease at Kíli's face. Fíli felt an answering one on his.

Crossing the meadow with long strides to where Kíli stood, Fíli called, “Hark at the din!”

Kíli laughed a tremulous little laugh and met his brother in the middle of the ruined village. When they were close enough, Kíli caught Fíli's sleeve and leaned close. “You don't think it's stone giants, do you?” His voice was quiet, as if he was afraid they would hear him.

Fíli grinned and slapped him on the back. “Stone giants are only a story, Kíli. Don't worry about them.” He pulled his brother's hood up against the rain, yanking it down over Kíli's eyes. Kíli batted his hands away. “Stone giants or no stone giants,” Fíli said, “we should pack up. It sounds like we're in for that storm everybody's been on about.”

“But what about the fish?” Kíli straightened his hood and looked at Fíli with a set about his eyes and mouth that threatened petulance. “What about the fire?”

Fíli gestured at the rain. “Don't be stupid! You heard that thunder, didn't you?”

Scowling at him, Kíli shoved his hands into the pockets of his jerkin and stalked away, toward the river. Fíli, irritation knotting in his guts, pulled up his own hood and went to retrieve his fishing lines.

He had hooked nothing, just as he had expected. The river was too fast today, too full of whirling currents and debris from upstream. Fíli wound the silk around and around his hand, glaring at it, until it was bundled. He shoved the lines into his pack and shouldered it again. Under his hood, his wet hair stuck to his cheeks and hung down his back in tangles. He thought of the hearthfire at the inn, blazing even now as he stood in the rain, miles and miles away, beside a cold river in a ruined village with his brother being an idiot. He thought of a mug of dark ale and a roast, spitted rabbit, and warmth. Fíli bundled his cloak around himself fiercely, wishing for fur, and turned downstream to yell at his brother.

Kíli stood at the very edge of the bank with his bow, sighting down an arrow into the rushing water. As Fíli stared, he loosed it, and it shot straight down into the river, and was gone. 

“What in Mahal's name are you doing?” Fíli shouted over the rain and the river noise.

Kíli looked up. “Shooting fish!”

By his sides, Fíli's hands made fists. “Will you for once in your life stop being a complete and utter airhead and _come on_? I want to go back!”

A spark leapt in Kíli's eyes and he opened his mouth – but Fíli didn't hear whatever Kíli had to say back to him, because at that moment lightning blinded them both, streaking down from the heavens, and thunder rent the air around them.

Fíli clapped his hands over his ears and blinked, hard, to chase away the red and green afterimages that danced in front of his eyes. The thunder bellowed and growled and Fíli thought briefly of stone giants – and then, as the noise rumbled and muttered into nothing again, Fíli rubbed his eyes and looked up.

Kíli was gone.

Struck stone still for the longest of moments, Fíli stared at the space where his brother had been. There was no trace that he had ever been there, except – yes, except for there, at the edge of the bank, where the earth was mud, churned with slipping bootprints. In his chest, Fíli's heart gave a kick – and he was running, shouting, along the bank beside the swollen river.

The water was black under the darkening sky, churning in whitish foam at the banks and the rocks. It wasn't the same river they had played in so many Sundays. It had become a monster. There was no sign of Kíli. No dark head broke the water; no pale hand reaching out. 

The meadow lay beside the river with the once-village in it; after the ruins petered out and what might have once been a road disappeared under the grass, the dark pines came down to the river once more. Fíli burst into them, trying to scan the ground, the bank and the river all at once. It was even darker under the trees. Fíli pelted on, calling.

He followed the river downstream half a mile or more before faltering. There was too much river, and too much darkness. Thunder growled overhead. Vascillating on the bank, he stared downstream; then up; then down again. The pines dripped cold, heavy drops. The vast dark space of the forest pressed in around him, and Fíli felt suddenly very alone.

He turned back, and started back the way he had come, eyes on the river, calling Kíli's name.

It was an hour – though it felt more, Fíli hugging his arms to himself and biting his tongue too hard – of back and forth on the bank before Fíli, not even seeing, tripped over something in the dark. It was an arm. 

Kíli lay, half in, half out of the water, at a place where the bank was shallow. Face down in the pine needles, his fingers were white, dug like claws into the earth. Fíli scrambled to grab him – cold as death – and turn him over.

Purple bruises stood livid on Kíli's bone white face. Fíli took his chin in his fingers. Kíli's lips were blue, speedwell blue. There was a shadow on his closed eyes. Fíli couldn't tell if he was breathing.

Grabbing him under the arms and dragging him out of the water, Fíli knelt and pulled his brother back against him. And there! Against his palm on Kíli's chest – a flutter like a tethered bird: fast, irregular.

Kíli was soaked, but Fíli wrapped his arms around him – his chest, his shoulders – and buried his face in his brother's wet hair. He held his breath against the emotion that wanted out, and tightened his grip on his brother. His own heart thumped in his chest as if it were trying to escape. He was whispering, despite himself, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...” He didn't know for what. 

When Kíli jerked in his arms, Fíli started. Kíli shuddered against him, muscular and unconscious, and without opening his eyes he heaved and retched up riverwater streaked with bile. Fíli wiped his sleeve across his brother's mouth and gently let him go, easing him down onto his side on the carpet of brown needles.

Fíli still had his pack. He threw it down, now, and yanked out of it the cloak that he had taken off halfway up the hill out of the town that morning. On the ground, Kíli lay, unmoving and pale. Fíli smoothed the wet hair out of his face before undressing him, fingers fumbling at buckles and knots –

– and a memory came unbidden, of a torchlit room under Ered Luin, and Kíli small and irrepressible, Fíli little older, trying to get his brother to sit still so he could lace his boots –

– and Fíli blinked hard and scored his sleeve across his eyes, sniffing. He wasn't in the forest any more; he was underground and stifling. No matter. He pulled off Kíli's sodden clothes, throwing them away, and once he was naked – and so, so white – Fíli half lifted him, to wrap him in his cloak.

Kíli was boneless in his arms. Fíli sat him against the thin trunk of a pine and went to gather kindling. He moved in expanding circles clockwise around Kíli's tree, not letting it out of his sight. When he had enough for a small fire, he returned, dropped the wood on the ground at Kíli's feet like a cat with a dead mouse and felt for his flint.

His flint. He didn't have it. Hands clenching, he remembered. It was still in the meadow in the shadow of the statue, over a mile away by now. He could go back for it – he could, and be back in half an hour. He looked at Kíli, bundled against the tree, face small and white between his hair and the cloak.

Wishing he could tear himself in two, Fíli sat, and pulled Kíli to him. Cradling him between his legs, Fíli wrapped his arms around him again and with his flat palms rubbed the cloak over his skin. He rested his chin on his little brother's shoulder, and tried to warm him back to life.

The forest darkened around them. Fíli had lost all sense of time from the moment he had opened his eyes to see his brother gone from the riverbank. Now, holding onto Kíli and listening to his shallow breathing, he couldn't have said what were seconds and what hours. He only knew that it was when at last the forest darkness surrounded them like wool – and above the branches and above the clouds there must be stars out – that Kíli at last, at last stirred against him and made a whimpering sound.

“Kíli?” Fíli hooked his chin over Kíli's collarbone, and palmed his chest under the layers of leather and wool. “Kíli, wake up.” Kíli's head slumped back against Fíli's shoulder, and he moaned. The sound was loud in Fíli's ear. “Kíli,” he said, “please wake up.”

Kíli shifted, hands under the cloak moving, striving for something. Fíli tightened his hold around his arms. Kíli struggled, with the strength of a kitten. He turned his head, made a noise that tried to be words.

“You're all right,” Fíli said, who was suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. “Everything's going to be all right. You're going to be fine, I promise. I've got you.”

“Where am I?” Kíli's voice was hoarse, and he slurred. 

“You're here with me. You're perfectly safe.”

Kíli shifted weakly, turning into Fíli's grip and nuzzling his face into Fíli's neck. “I want to go home,” he said quietly, reminding Fíli with a force like a gut punch of the child that he had once been.

Fíli hugged him tighter, the trapped bird heartbeat under his palm. “We'll go home soon. Just stay with me, now. Stay awake.” He leant his cheek against Kíli's clammy forehead. _Keep talking_ , he thought. “Hey,” he said, shaking Kíli's shoulder gently. “Do you remember that time...?”

Fíli kept talking, rummaging his mind for good memories. That time when, maybe ten years ago now, they worked for a summer in a chickenscratch mine with a little band of men who were sure there was gold in there, deep down; the last time Uncle Thorin came to visit, and all the times before that; that time when they were small and decided to go on a grand adventure, and got lost in the woods – that one struck a little too close for comfort, but Kíli didn't seem to mind, and smiled against Fíli's neck. Above them, the storm subsided, thunder rolling away into the distance. The darkness was dense and silent, and Fíli thought about wolves again, and orc raiding parties.

When he had run out of good stories, he kept talking anyway. He was reduced to simplicity: a mouth making sounds and a pair of arms that held onto his brother. He talked about the homely darkness of Ered Luin, fire-punctuated; about the half-mythic gewgaws their mother kept, souvenirs of legendary Erebor, in well-thumbed gold and studded with gems full of deific glitter; how she would, every morning before anything else, put on her best, heaviest jewellery and wind gold thread into her soft, dark hair. Fíli spoke of how they used to sit at her feet and watch her, with her head high under a circlet's weight. She never stooped to less than she was, even when they had had to send the servants away. Fíli remembered that, dimly through the fog of babyhood. Kíli had not yet been born.

In the night, they shivered together. Kíli tilted his head and looked up at Fíli from drowsy eyes, shine scarcely visible in the night. He said, “We could go back, couldn't we? To Erebor. For her, I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I said I didn't want to live underground forever,” Kíli said, seized by a sudden fit of teeth chattering. “But if we could go back to Erebor, I wouldn't mind, because mother would be a princess again, and have all her old things back.”

Fíli set his jaw. “Erebor is lost, Kíli. There is no going back.”

Kíli looked away again. Then, he said, “Where's my bow? I think I left it somewhere.”

The bow was lost in the river, long gone. “I'll find it for you in the morning,” Fíli lied.

Around them, the darkness kept them secret. There were small noises in the forest; but what made them, Fíli couldn't see. Rigid, he shivered without his cloak. The storm had cleared away the heat like drawing back a veil, and now the air was clear and cold. Under his hand, though, Kíli's heartbeat had eased. 

Despite the cold, despite his own pounding heart that would not let up, and despite all his muscles aching with tension, Fíli must have drowsed. When he came to again, the forest was washed with a dim grey light. It limned the straight trunks of the pines and touched the carpet of needles. It bled the colour from everything. For a moment, Fíli thought he woke in a stone hall full of slim pillars. It chimed homelike in the deepest chambers of his heart.

Then he remembered everything, and jolted upright. 

Kíli, who had slumped to his side to lie with his cheek pressed to Fíli's thigh, stirred and mumbled something unhappy in his sleep. Fíli extracted himself from underneath his brother, who was heavy in sleep, and tried to stand. His legs jarred and stumbled like a newborn foal's. Stamping to coax the life back into them, Fíli staggered about their abortive camp, bending painfully to pick up the things he had strewn about the evening before. The clothes he had stripped off Kíli were still wet, and bone-achingly cold, so he shoved them deep into his pack and buckled it over them.

When he roused him, Kíli came grudgingly from sleep. His lips were no longer blue, but white; and there were still bruise-dark circles around his heavy-lidded eyes. Onto him, Fíli forced his own boots, still warm and dry, and under cloak, his tunic. As he pulled it off, the morning chill stung his bare skin and he hunched his shoulders against a shudder.

When he had Kíli belted and fastened and laced to within an inch of his life, he ducked under his brother's arm, shouldering his weight, and lifted him to his feet. Kíli swayed against him. Fíli patted him on the chest. “Right,” he said, voice full of cheer he didn't feel, “off we go.”

They tried a step forward. When that worked, they tried another one, and another, until they were walking – half stumbling, kicking one another's ankles, Kíli dragging his feet in Fíli's boots – but walking nonetheless.

It was a slow, halting walk. They could only progress at best at a quarter of their normal pace, and Kíli kept having to stop and rest. Moreover, Fíli found barefoot walking less pleasant than he had hoped. Pine needles were named so for a reason, and that was not mentioning the myriad little rocks, pinecones, pincered beetles and so on. 

But the sun rose. It cast slanting bars of light through branches and lit the forest green and gold; it warmed the day, even under the trees, and did what it could to banish the memory of cold. Fíli, bare chested, no longer shivered. Noon passed, and they slept, briefly, curled together under a tree in unconscious echo of the long dark night before.

The evening turned golden, and under the trees clouds of midges swarmed, by the time they reached the edge of the forest and the town again. Hanging on his brother's shoulder, Kíli stumbled doggedly onward, head down, like someone asleep. Fíli winced at every step. 

The slope of the pasture spread out below them, green and sunlit. Sheep looked up, skittered away from them. A boy, watching the sheep, stood momently, transfixed; then pelted away, down toward the town. Fíli concentrated on his feet, one jarring step after the other. When he next looked up they halfway down the hill, and the great, bald figure of the smith – for once Fíli's heart leapt to see him – was yards away, lumbering toward them.

Fíli uncurled his stiff fingers from Kíli's coat with some effort, and let the smith take him up into his arms like a child. When the smith set off down the field again, Fíli trailed after him like a dog after its master, every footstep like walking on fire coals.

In the months they had spent there, they hadn't been into the smith's own house before. It was small and smelled of the herbs that hung, drying, above the fire. There was a wooden-floored attic high beneath the eaves. The smith had to stoop; Fíli did not. The attic was crowded with barrels sweet-smelling straw bales. Amidst all this: a thin mattress on the floor, some ragged furs. The smith knelt and lay Kíli there. Fíli fell, more than sat, beside him. 

The smith disappeared without a word. After a while – Fíli could not say how long – he returned, with a flagon of steaming wine and a cup. After Fíli had persuaded Kíli to drink, holding his head to the cup, the smith nodded at Fíli's feet. “You want to have a look at those. I'll bring some water by and by.”

Fíli looked down at his feet and saw, uncomprehending for a moment, that he had tracked red in over the floor. He touched his foot, dark with mud, and realised that he was bleeding. He absorbed this with numb disinterest. Instead, when the smith was gone again – he was having trouble paying attention to him now – he shucked his pack and his weapons, drank six cups of hot wine, one after the other, and lay down next to his brother. 

Kíli was shivering again, in bursts. Fíli drew the furs up to his chin and put his arms around him, as he had in the forest. Kíli mumbled in his sleep – or what was close to sleep – and whether it was westron or Khuzdûl, Fíli couldn't tell. Fíli put his forehead against Kíli's shoulder, and fell almost immediately into a black, dreamless sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

### 3.

Fíli awoke – head full of fog, for a long moment completely lost and groping for his sword – when the smith's wife came up the steps to the attic on quiet feet, with a bowl of porridge in each hand. Compared to the smith, she was tiny, with bright yellow hair and dark eyes creased about with crow's feet. She accepted Fíli's gruff (more bewildered than anything) thank you with a nod. 

Kíli remained as he was, curled up into himself in a nest of furs. His dark hair was stringy, tossed around his head and sweat-stuck to his face. When Fíli smoothed it away, Kíli opened his eyes, as suddenly as if he hadn't been asleep. They were candle-bright in the dim attic. 

“There's food for you,” Fíli said, picking up a bowl. It was warm in his hand.

Kíli shook his head. “I'm not hungry.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I'm not.” As he spoke, another shiver radiated through him, and made his teeth chatter. He tried to jerk away as Fíli felt his forehead with the backs of his fingers.

“You're hot.” Under a cool sweat, he burned.

With slow hands, Kíli struggled out of the layers than confined him, and tried to sit up. Sitting back against a barrel, he thrust out his hands for the bowl. Fíli gave it to him. Staring pointedly at Fíli from under his dark brows, Kíli picked up the spoon and shoved it into his mouth.

Fíli raised his own eyebrows. “All right. I understand. You're perfectly fine.” He shook his head and took up his own bowl. For a few minutes, they ate in silence – or Fíli ate. He felt hollowed out, and the porridge was so warm and smooth and the first thing he had eaten in more than a day. Kíli pushed the porridge about with a listless spoon, until he said, “Fíli.”

Fíli made a noise around a mouthful of porridge and looked up.

Kíli cleared his throat, gazing into his bowl. “Thanks for, um.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Saving me. I don't remember what happened very well.” He swallowed and looked up at last, flushed with not just fever. “And I'm sorry about the stupid fight.”

Swallowing his porridge, Fíli looked at his brother: dark hair all in tangles, half dressed, damp with fever sweat, and _alive_. He smiled a crooked, unselfconscious smile. “Don't be an idiot.” Kíli frowned at him. Fíli went on. “You're my brother. It's my job to look after you. And it's my job to fight with you, too.”

Kíli lifted his chin as if about to say that he could look after himself perfectly well, thanks very much – but then dropped it again, as in this particular instance the statement patently wouldn't have stood up to argument. He scowled down at his bowl. “Thanks anyway,” he said, adding: “And don't call me an airhead.”

Fíli punched his brother softly on the arm and returned to his porridge.

…

The next day, Fíli salved his feet with something that the smith's wife brought in a mortar, before pulling on his socks and his boots again, along with everything else, and – leaving Kíli asleep, feverish and animatedly dreaming – he went next door to the smithy. Much as his feet hurt, much as he would have liked to stay asleep under the furs, he couldn't sit and watch his brother any longer. He was sick of the sight of his stupid, beloved face.

The heat was gathering again, sticky and seductive. There would be more storms. Fíli worked, bare-chested once more, and fielded questions from townsfolk appearing in the open doorway to ask _were they all right? What happened?_ Fíli laid out the bare bones without looking up, shrugging one shoulder after another, as if to say that it was merely another day in the life of your average dwarf. It was when a sheep man – a burly, nobbly-headed type known to mutter about dragons – shuffled through the door and set a bundle down upon the flat of an anvil that Fíli looked up, caught off guard. The man explained in short words that it was from his wife, and they hoped the dwarves were all right, and best wishes, before ducking through the door again and disappearing into the sunlight.

The bundle was a loaf of seedy bread, a block of cheese, and a block of sheep's butter wrapped in paper. Fíli handled them carefully, as if they were small animals that might bite. He didn't smile, but something – a spiny kind of emotion – was turning and turning inside his head.

More packages came that day.

That night, as Fíli sat beside Kíli, who slept and stirred and talked nonsense, he thought about that evening at the inn, and Kíli pulling his blunt sword to defend him from an inn full of men. Kíli watching over him while he slept. Kíli, jutting his chin and swearing that he wouldn't let it happen again. He stroked his little brother's hot forehead to soothe his restless dreams and thought something half coherent about always doing everything together before he nodded, sitting, into sleep.

And so it went. The next day, Kíli's fever broke and he sat outside the house with the sun on his face while Fíli worked in the smithy. The day after that, Kíli rejoined his brother, and if they talked it was short and utilitarian with their hands. They moved their sleeping arrangements back to the smithy floor. When the next storm broke at night (and the next and the one after that) Kíli tossed and turned in his sleep. They ate the bread and cheese and butter and whatever else they were given sitting crosslegged on the floor, talking and remembering snatches of songs. And not too long after they had staggered back into town, a quarter dead and all over exhausted, they crossed the road with the smith to the inn after work again.

Meanwhile, summer slid inch by inch through thunderstorms and brief, soaking downpours into autumn. The evergreen pines kept the secret, and the scrubby grass was the same year 'round, but the way the moon hung crisp and silver in the blue sky in the morning was unmistakeable. There was a chill on the ground in the mornings that crept longer and longer into the day. Fíli and Kíli, riding alongside the smith on his cart pulled by his shaggy dray, Clover, to shoe horses and sell iron in neighbouring villages, began to wear cloaks again.

The rains came more frequently but less dramatically; they blew into town and drizzled on and off for a day or two, and made the brothers glad they worked inside. And friction charged between them, uncomfortable – always glancing out at the weather, sleeping uneasily. It was the knowledge that soon it would be time to go.

A dwarf they didn't know passed through the town one Sunday afternoon. (Since that Sunday the weather broke, Fíli and Kíli hadn't returned to the ruined village by the river. Instead, they walked in the woods – not too far – and came back before dark to drink in the inn.) He let the brothers buy him a drink, and they talked about winter under the mountains: the firelit dark, the chatter of Khuzdûl, the good dwarvish ale. When he asked them when they were heading homeward, they exchanged a look, and Fíli said 'Soon enough.”

That night, in the familiar dark of the smithy, Kíli, from his bedroll, said, “So when are we leaving?”

Fíli rolled onto his side to squint at him. “Next week?” he said. “A week more can't hurt. And we shouldn't leave the smith in the lurch.”

There was a moment of silence. Then, “Next week it is.” Kíli pulled his blanket up to his chin and stared at the ceiling.

Frowning, Fíli propped himself on one elbow. “Aren't you looking forward to getting back?”

Kíli threw an arm over his eyes, as if they were in bright sunlight instead of darkness. “It's not that I don't want to go home,” he said, “because I do.”

“But?”

His lip twitched, equivocating. “I like it here, too. Not just here. I mean... you know.”

“I know.” Fíli did.

“Out here in the world. I know Uncle Thorin talks about dwarves having to work among men like it's some kind of curse, but I... I don't think it is.” That statement – disagreement with Uncle Thorin – hung in the air like the ringing of a bell. They were both silent for a moment, letting its reverberations die down.

After a long while, Fíli said, “You know how mother would worry.”

Kíli made an affirmative noise, shifting under his blanket. “That's what mothers do, though. I don't think she'll stop worrying even when we've white beards down to our ankles.”

Fíli snorted. “If any of us are alive to see the day you've a beard down to your ankles, I'll give you a coin for every hair of it – ow!” This last as Kíli's foot caught Fíli in the shin. Fíli shoved Kíli's shoulder, and, after a minor scuffle, they drifted down and down into the comforting dark of sleep. Like someone sinking into sand, Fíli made one last struggle toward the light to say, “So do we stay?”

Kíli made an incoherent noise that became, gradually, “Yes.”

Then they both slept.

…

Autumn, alternately chill and rained upon, marched through the town. In such a place, where little ever changed, the flat pewter sky and the damp made life just generally that little bit more unpleasant, insinuating into one's bones. The dwarves, like the people of the town, kept their heads down under the weather.

When winter came, it came in thin white flakes from a cold sky. The townsfolk looked up almost as one as snow touched their shoulders. They tightened their coats and muttered foreboding.

Kíli was the first to catch sight of it, raising his head to draw an arm across his brow, fuller in hand. He straightened, staring. It was only when Fíli said “Oi!” and looked up that he caught sight of the snow, blowing in flurries through the open door. His grip on the tongs in his hand slackened, and he would have dropped the hot metal he held had the smith not glanced up and shouted “Here, back to work! We make precious enough blades for you two to bugger one up fretting after snow like a couple of shavers!”

That night, they paused in the road to look up at the sky. It still snowed, but the flakes only died on the ground, leaving everything damp and cold. The evening had drawn in, and the sky was dark and close. Kíli caught a flake on his glove, and watched as it dissolved. They shared a look, then; a look which communicated all the long miles between them and home, with the winter closing its jaws, and the resolution to stay beginning to actually mean something after all.

The snow did not stick, but the days thereafter were delicately frosted: rooves and pastures touched with silver. Days became weeks and the weather maintained its trajectory into winter. One night, after a day when the crisp silver moon had hung all day in the sky opposite the cold sun, the boys bedded the girl with the soft brown hair again. This time she came without speedwell flowers. Kíli took her first, in the smithy, while Fíli waited and kept watch outside, trying to look casual. After, they swapped. Against the workday-warm stone wall, he wrapped her soft white legs around his hips and plunged inside her. She was hot and slick already, and Fíli's sex-and-ale-fuzzed brain bounced from not thinking about his brother to thinking, very hard, about his brother, as she made short work of him.

Her name was Girda. Afterwards, she kissed him on the nose as if he were a child, rearrayed her skirts, fluffed her beautiful hair, and left. Fíli found the warm flagstones by the forge and fell there, fully clothed, burying his head in his arms. After a short while, Kíli dropped to the floor beside him. Fíli throbbed, sex's hot afterglow thickening his blood. They didn't say a word to one another, but slept inches apart, the space between them solid as a stone wall. It was Durin's Day.

Winter came on, and northerly winds brought grey-bellied clouds heavy with snow. One day, Fíli and Kíli woke to look outside at a world changed: such whiteness, thickening the world, rounding the corners of everything. A sky full of whirling fat flakes. Caught on a sleeve or glove, the tiny pattern to them was visible; the miniscule structure.

Fíli was shrugging into his coat outside the smithy doors when a handful of snow caught him in the side of the head. He staggered, blinking cold out of his eyes, and another burst across his chest, filling his tunic with snow.

Twenty yards away, Kíli hopped from foot to foot, incapable with glee. Fíli bent and scooped a double handful of snow. Instead of throwing it, he charged Kíli like a bull. When Kíli, floundering in the calf-deep snow, failed to get out of the way quickly enough, Fíli drove a shoulder into his gut and took him down, overwhelming him and shovelling snow into his clothes. Under him, Kíli yelped and struggled, spasmed with laughter. He only managed to escape when he thrust a palmful of snow straight into Fíli's face. They tussled like puppies until a glance from the smith quelled them, and they trailed inside, flicking meltwater at one another from the ends of their fingers.

Living and working in the smithy, the snow took a long time to lose its novelty. They larked about in it as they had as dwarrows in the Blue Mountains, early in the season before the mountain snow stopped them up completely underground. The townsfolk were less amused. They ploughed through it, heads down and faces set tense and longsuffering. The smith said it was against the possibility (or probability) of the weather worsening. Evenings in the inn, folk asked the brothers what their dwarven kin did in the winter.

“Work,” Fíli said, shrugging. “Same as ever.” The men nodded, comradely, over their mugs of ale. Of course, their nods said. So do we all.

Kíli went on. “But work in the mountain, usually. Mining. Shaping. Smithing, too.”

“Winter,” Fíli said, “is the time to work on things... you know, things that aren't so quick. Things that might not sell right away. Or maybe won't sell at all.”

“Here we make horseshoes and plough blades and buckles. In winter, we make...” Kíli furrowed his brow, searching for words. “Valuable things.”

Fíli saw the word _valuable_ go astray in the men's minds, and didn't know how to correct it. Not just valuable in the sense of coin. Summer they scattered like seeds on the wind, spending their days working for men. Winter was the time for long smithings, for forging such artifacts as they could afford to keep. For the dwarves.

Some of the men began to say that things like buckles and horseshoes might not mean much to hoity-toity folks as had gold to play with, but they were plenty valuable to plain folk, honest folk – and Fíli and Kíli nodded emphatically, shouldering the sentiment, ultimate meaning lost.

The snow melted, became brown slush underfoot. In the fields, the sheep's fleeces grew fatter and yellower. A deepening chill settled over the land.


	4. Chapter 4

### 4.

Midwinter came, with a miserable snow mixed with rain. In the town, they strung lanterns from house to house, and when the dark came on soon after noon, they carried oil lamps in the street and from under hoods and within furs grinned at one another and wished each other the joy of it. For Fíli and Kíli, it was their first midwinter. 

Like most townsfolk, they spent the day at the inn. They clung close in the throng around the central hearthfire, hailing serving women to buy and be bought ale in turn. They had to shout to be heard. All hostile murmurs had been long forgotten. Even Saul exchanged nods now and again.

Later in the night, when the clouds cleared and the stars shone bright overhead, the innkeep heaved up a mead barrel on his shoulder, and carried it – dragging another behind him with a stout rope – outside. They threw open the doors and spilled out into the road. The innkeep drove a tap into a barrel with one clout, and they crowded about it, downing ale and thrusting their mugs under the stream. Someone had a fiddle, and struck up a tune. The men – grim working men all – caught each others arms and swung each other about, singing. Women picked up their skirts and danced in the slush, falling over one another and into each others' arms. If slugabeds shouted from their doorways, nobody heard them. Girda danced around Fíli and Kíli, evading their beckoning arms with a smile, flicking her colourful skirt at them and laughing over her shoulder.

The crowd thinned as the hours wore on, folk staggering away in pairs, arms around one another with moonstruck grins and 'merry midwinter's thrown casually about. Among those left at the inn, inside mingling with out, deep-voiced and heartfelt singing sprung up, group to group. Fíli's mouth was full of the honey-sweetness of the mead, and he felt on the precipice between happy drunkenness and his head beginning to spin unpleasantly. When the latest song – about love or sheep or cold or something – died down, he raised his mug in an unsteady hand and closed his eyes, and started himself to sing.

The tune bowed and swung and rose and fell, meant for deep dwarf voices. Somewhere, he had lost his brother. He had half expected Kíli's hand on his shoulder, and voice joining his; but he found himself singing on alone. It was a song about old companions lost, and the passing of time, that inevitable tide that bears down upon you and sweeps you before it, helpless. And of course, obliquely, it was about dragons, that shadow at the back of dwarf consciousness. All dwarven songs were in one way or another about dragons.

And his voice, in the mead and the ale, wasn't all it could be, and he sang relentlessly alone, and it was a sad, sad song so perhaps by the end of it his eyes were wet in a way that had nothing to do with the torch smoke; but when he fell silent suddenly there were clumsy hands clapping him on the shoulder and a ragged cheer from the motley group that remained. Somebody asked if he would teach it to them; Fíli demurred as graciously as he could. The fiddle-player scraped a little rendition of the melody from memory. Somebody else pressed a new mug full of mead into his hand. Fíli, knowing it was a mistake, drank it – because what else can you do when it's free?

Then at last, at long last, there was his brother: hair mussed, eyes bright. From his spot against the wall, Fíli beamed in an unfocused manner. When Kíli put his arm around him (saying _home, sleep_ ) Fíli noticed that close to he smelled of sex: a tart, damp tang. Fíli slung his arm around his brother's neck and leaned into him, and let Kíli drag him away.

Fíli wasn't sick. It would have been more than his pride's worth. But he lay awake while the dark smithy spun about him on his bedroll, and heat shivered over his skin. Kíli was a dark heap beside him.

“Kíli?”

“Mm.”

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Kíli.”

“What?”

A long, long pause. Fíli's eyes drifted closed. “I'm glad you didn't die.”

Something that sounded like a muffled snort from Kíli. “Me too, as it happens.”

“I wouldn't have known what to do if you died.”

“Good.”

“Really.”

“I know.” Kíli's fingers touched Fíli's forehead, as cool as stone, unselfconsciously comforting. “Go to sleep.”

Fíli reached out, grabbed the front of Kíli's tunic, held on. “Shut up. You go to sleep.”

“I'm trying to.”

Another long silence. It was so long, Fíli thought he was falling asleep, until he surprised himself by saying, “You wouldn't leave me, would you?”

“What?” Nonplussed.

“You're my brother.” Fíli struggled for words that fit, found none. Everything was sharp and wrong-feeling on his tongue. “We do everything together.”

A hand found his hand in the dark. “It's all right,” Kíli said, voice full of false heartiness masking a wavering note of confusion. “I'm not going anywhere.”

There was nothing else to say. Fíli, feeling older brother's authority slipping from underneath him, found Kíli's head and clumsily tousled his hair. When Kíli tried to swat him away, Fíli patted his brother on the cheek with a too-rough hand. “Now,” he said, “go to sleep.” He didn't stay awake to see if Kíli did as ordered: instead he rolled over and fell into sleep with his face pressed against the warm familiar stone.

…

After midwinter, the weather only got worse. They had scarce taken down the lanterns strung from the houses when a snowstorm blew in from the west, darkening the day and filling the world with whirling and cold. The wind dogged 'round corners, down chimneys, into clothes to bite at skin. The smith, insisting, shepherded Fíli and Kíli through the deepening snow from the smithy to his house. They sat on the rushes by the hearth and ate the vegetable stew that was given them. The smith and his wife puttered about the house. The smith, stooping from his immense height, looked unusual in his little, shuttered house; like a man caged. They spoke in stilted bursts of conversation – about metal and leather and wood, and about folk in the town and jobs to do; and later, as the house grew dark and darker around them, and the hearthfire the only light, they woodworked (sword hilts and tool handles) while the smith's wife mended clothes with a fishbone needle, occasionally darting them penetrating glances with her black eyes. The talk changed: they told of their mother, and their grand and impressive uncle (leaving out, of course, those things of no interest to men: Durin, and princehood, and heritage). At last, when they had sloe gin from the still behind the house in their hands and burning in their bellies, they talked, not looking from the fire, about their father.

Fíli remembered him so infrequently, when he did it was with a fierce ache in the gut and something akin to anger – directionless, unreasonable – as a pressure at his throat. He had been scarce old enough to hold a wooden sword when his father had at last disappeared forever – the few memories he had strung bright, like gems, in his mind.

He had been golden, like his eldest son, with a smile like quicksilver. Fíli remembered being whirled up into his arms, his small face suddenly before his father's great rough one. He remembered being kissed, wetly, upon the forehead, and the tickling of that braided moustache. When Kíli was born, his laughter seemed to fill the whole world. _Now we have one each_ , he had said to their mother. _My golden boy, your dark heartbreaker_. And he had kissed them both, crossed with swordbelts and cloak over his shoulders, and gone, following Thorin on some brave, dangerous quest that would take all year and win them gold and glory. Before he had gone, he had knelt to Fíli on the great threshold of Ered Luin, as far as his son was allowed to follow. He had taken his shoulders in his big hands, and said, _Take care of your mother and your brother while I'm gone_.

He never returned, not even when Thorin came back, bloody and smelling of smoke and pony, with a world of darkness in his eyes, and Dís had lifted her chin, and stared her brother down with a face set like granite. Thorin had gone away again, shortly after; and Dís had cut her hair, and her sons', down to a bristle, and everywhere they went dwarves turned their faces away before their grief. Fíli was left, having had death explained to him forthrightly by his mother, the only golden dwarf in a dark family.

They brought his father's body home to the Blue Mountains shortly after. They had washed him and dressed him in new armour, shining bright in the torchlight. But Fíli had seen his father's own armour, and the ruin the wargs had made of it, and the rust of old blood. If he had had nightmares after that (blood and bones and red teeth) then he never told anyone about it.

He didn't tell the smith and his wife all of this. The basics sufficed. While Fíli talked, as ever when he talked about their father, Kíli watched him with wide, shining eyes; eyes full of curiosity and ultimate incomprehension. While Fíli had precious few memories, Kíli had none at all. Fíli thought he was probably happier for it.

After he had done, for a long moment there was no sound but the quiet roar of the fire along its logs. Neither the smith nor his wife, to their credit, said it was a shame or a pity. Instead, the smith's wife, without looking up from her mending, told about their son.

Their blue-eyed son, born under such an auspicious star. Every other child had ended bloodily too soon, or born limp and silent. But their son grew up hale and happy, quick to laugh and quick to make his parents laugh. Her needle went smoothly in and out, in and out of the cloth. He had a fuller in his hand as soon as he could toddle, and his favourite toy was a pair of tongs, to grab things he shouldn't have. He was smithing with his father before he was ten, swamped in a leather apron, feeling his way into the metal.

When he was fourteen – a vicious tug of the thread – he was shoeing a horse in a hamlet thirty miles from home when the animal lashed out with its foot. It caught him in the head. So the villagers said, when they had chased the horse away, the boy was convulsing on the ground, mouth frothing blood, blue eyes wide open to the sky. He took an hour and a half to die.

The smith was silent, watching his wife's needle going in and out of the cloth. Then, in the quiet that filled the room after she was done, he stood up and stretched, cracking his knuckles and his vertebrae with a sound like chestnuts in a fire. “I'm going to sleep,” he said, and Fíli took this as a cue. He stood, jerking Kíli with him by the shoulder, and accepted the blankets that were pressed on them. They bedded down in the attic once more, and Fíli fell asleep to uneasy memory-dreams of cold and bloody feet.

That snowstorm was followed by another, and after that another, with barely a period of peace between them. The doors had to be shouldered open in the morning. Drifts of snow heaped against walls. Where the snow between the houses came to most folks' knees, on Fíli and Kíli it came almost past their waists. They took to wearing several layers of underwear, and got used to frozen thighs.

It was one snowbound night that they spent beside the smith's hearthfire, busying themselves with little jobs, that there came a hammering on the door. All at once, they were silent and still. The smith put his shoulder to the door – the wind entered, full of snow, battering the heathfire down to the logs, darkening the room.

It was Saul, to tell them that the sheep were dying.

Nothing else was needed for the smith, and Fíli and Kíli followed his lead without question. The smith's wife followed them, in furred boots and her thickest cloak. They left the hearth afire and battled out, into the storm.

The world was dark and thick with snow. Wind, with strong, articulate fingers, tore at their cloaks and their tunics, wormed sinuous into their clothes to freeze their skin. They went single file, the smith in front, massive shoulders into the wind like a cart horse. Fíli went behind him, squinting against the ice in the wind, having shoved Kíli into his wake.

They passed between the buildings of the town and left them behind, quickly taken by the whirling snow and the darkness. With their feet they followed the slope of the ground, up into the pastures above the town, where the open fields were fringed by the deeper darkness of the pine woods.

Up in the pastures, the snow lay feet thick, carved up by men's churned paths through the fields. It came to the dwarves' shoulders. Torches burned on the hill, ragged red pennants in the wind.

A man found them floundering up to the light, and caught the smith by the shoulders, shouting something into the wind. Big, heavy shovels were thrust into their hands. A gesture, thrown out at the wild white snow. The sheep. The sheep were out there.

Sheep, in bad weather, won't try to escape it, or walk about to stave off the chill. Sheep turn their backs into the weather and shoulder it, duck their heads under it. So when the snow comes and they turn away from it and close their eyes, the snow does not pass over them but builds drifts upon them, as if they were a rock or a hillock.

The pasture was a wilderness of white. Wielding shovels as if to do battle with the demon weather, they forged out, into the pasture. They took seperate tracks: the smith and his wife one way, Fíli and Kíli another. Walled in by the chest-deep snow and the sky full of darkness, the brothers lost sight of the smith and his wife as soon as they glanced away. The torches, held by goodness knew who, were treacherous red stars in the darkness: here one moment, gone, then there again. Hair and beards heavy and white with snow, they dug with shovels almost as tall as them. 

Before long, the work and the weather reduced them to automatons: without mind, no more than the thrust and heave of shovels in the snow. Always touching, not to lose one another – boot to boot, shoulder to shoulder.

They found a dead sheep, completely by chance: Fíli's shovel struck something different to snow, however white. It was cold and stiff, clouded eyes staring. Kíli lingered for a moment longer than necessary, fingers in its fleece, mouth a line, before taking up his shovel again.

The next sheep they found was alive. Fíli, half frozen, hands claws upon the shovel, stood for precious seconds blinking snow from his eyes, mouth slack, as Kíli knelt, shovel flung down, digging the animal out of the drift with his hands. The sheep bleated, eyes rolling, and kicked without strength. Fíli dropped his shovel into the snow and knelt, closing his fingers in the sheep's fleece and dragging it out of the drift.

It fought them, biting with its mouth full of flat teeth. Fíli cuffed it around the head to quiet it and, internally quavering with uncertainty, slung it around his shoulders, holding it by its feet, as he'd seen the sheep men do.

It was three quarters his size, and heavier than it looked. He bent under it like carrying a sack of grain and turned back the way they had come, snow flinging into his face. Kíli followed, watching them with his dark eyes wide. The snow had filled their churned tracks, and they fought through snow that clung to their legs, their waists, tried to hold onto them with wet and cold. 

When they reached the torches, they were numb and clogged with snow, and nigh unrecognisable. The found sheep milled, howled about by the wind and ringed by sheep men and women, bulky in cloaks and furs. Fíli let his sheep go; it bucked out of his grip, stumbled, bleated. It knelt. Kíli fell to his knees beside it, and looked up at his brother, confusion bright through the snow. Fíli knelt beside them.

The lamb came in blood, nose and forefeet first, shining wet. It fell, all at once, to the snow, a tangle of its own limbs. The pink rope of the umbilicus still connected it to its mother. Fíli, with hands careful as if he were handling pottery, gathered the lamb into his arms, to keep it from the cold. It struggled – not against him, but with a newborn's jerky animation. There was a milky caul over its wedge-shaped face. With his gloved fingers, Fíli cleared it away, and the lamb opened its mouth, and all its little body was wire-taut with the effort of breathing.

Over the noise of the storm, the wind and the snow and the shouting of the townsfolk in the pasture, there was suddenly another noise, a new noise. It rose, a single note, ice-clear, and was joined by others, offering a song up to the snowstorm. The howling of wolves.

Across the snow-filled distance that seperated them, across the sheep and her lamb, Fíli and Kíli met each other's eyes, and in one look communicated all that needed to be communicated. That it was the deep of winter and the wolves would be starving; the sheep were vulnerable; that the townsfolk were as vulnerable as the sheep; that nobody else carried weapons as a matter of course. Unlike them.

Fíli, lamb in his arms, signalled with his eyes: _wait_.

Kíli, eyebrows drawing down, said _no_. He rose in one motion and leapt into the snow, drawing his sword, and was lost in the whirling darkness.

Lamb in his arms, tethered to its mother, Fíli cast about. Long seconds passed; and then there was someone beside him in the storm: a sheep man. The man, anonymous in the snowstorm, grasped the umbilicus, and bent his head to it. It broke with a spurt of black blood, and the man took the lamb from Fíli's arms. Fíli passed it over and as soon as he had felt the loss of its heat like a bereavement. He staggered to his feet, freed, and pelted away from the torchlight after his brother.

It wasn't far to the trees, though it felt a great distance. Wading through it felt like through an icy river, that resisted every step. But under the pines, as he stumbled into them on legs like blocks of wood, the chaos was less. The wind howled through the trees, cutting like a knife. It was dark, now: storm-dark, and the profound, feathery-feeling lightlessness of a night in the wide world where there is nothing to illuminate it. Fíli put a hand on the hilt of a knife.

He was stumbling, free hand groping in front of him, when a wolf howled. The sound was nearer now. Fíli, in one quick blood-rush motion, drew his longest knife. His hand white-knuckled on the hilt. The smell of the newborn lamb was still on him, its birth-blood slick on his hands, his arms. He could smell it himself, feel the ghost of its heat. Eyes wide, night-blind, he held onto the trunk of a pine with one hand, and with the other thrust the knife out into the night, held it there, wavering.

There was an instant, the briefest instant, wherein Fíli saw the glint – like a pair of gold coins – of the eyes of the wolf in the dark; then it was upon him, and all his world was the immense weight of the creature, and fur, and its furnace-heat.

It was bigger than him. All the breath had been crushed out of him between the wolf and the snow. The only sound he could make, then, as the massive jaws closed on his left arm and shook, was a whimper that was torn away by the wind. With his other hand, Fíli brought the knife around in a flashing arc and buried it between the wolf's ribs.

The wolf made a noise like a scream, letting go his arm and writhing away from him. In the dark and the wind, all Fíli knew was that the weight was off him, and he could breathe again. He scrambled to his feet. The wolf had taken his long knife with it, thrashing in its death and staining the blue snow black. Fíli staggered back, away from it, groping for his other knives.

It was then he saw the other wolves. Dark hunter-shapes against the snow, barred by the thin pines. There were at least four of them. They investigated their fallen packmate, now twitching in the last throes of her bloody death. They were lean, rough-furred, sharp-muzzled. Hungry as they were, even grief could not detain them long. Pair by pair, their flat yellow eyeshines turned on him.

Fíli drew a knife in each hand – but fumbled with his left, dropping it from clumsy fingers into the snow. He couldn't stoop to retrieve it. He jagged his right-handed knife back and forth through the air, a warning, as he placed one boot slowly, carefully, behind the other. The thought of running flitted through his mind: running like a rabbit, a brief panic dash, alive with fear, through the trees before the pack caught up with him. The certainty dropped like a stone into his guts: they would tear him to pieces.

The pack stared, breath rising in white plumes from their open mouths. The bravest took a questing step toward him; then came on, in little bounds that were almost playful except for how much ground it covered, how fast. Fíli gripped his knife, put his back against a tree.

The wolf was almost upon him – hot breath, bright eyes, white teeth – when a yell rent the air, and another shape hurtled from behind him. The wolves scattered with wild animal reflexes. Kíli swung his sword, a bright arc, and caught the closest – black blood spattered and the wolf screamed with a voice almost familiar. Kíli drew back and then plunged against the creature again, throwing all his weight behind his sword. The blade went into the wolf's belly and Kíli fell, driving it in, as the wolf died, struggling.

The other wolves had scattered. Now they hung back, no more than a suggestion of movement in the darkness.

Kíli regained his feet, sheathing his bloody sword, and Fíli sagged against his tree. An inane grin stretched his face, almost painful. Kíli crossed the distance to his brother in three long strides and caught him by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

Fíli let his chin drop onto his chest, suddenly exhausted by relief. “I suppose it was your turn to save me today, eh?”

Kíli was patting Fíli down, face all fierce with worry. “What's this?” He held up his hand: in the darkness, the wet on his gloved fingers was black.

Fíli looked down. His left arm was hot. Something dripped from his fingertips to the snow.

The pain came to him in one fell rush and his legs became water. He swayed, and Kíli caught him before he could fall. Kíli shouldered his weight under his good arm – it was harder this way around, Kíli those irritating few inches taller – and Fíli leaned his head on his brother's shoulder as the world spun about his feet. “The wolves will be back,” Kíli said. “We have to go.”

Trekking back through the snow was an effort. The storm wasn't abating; the townsfolk slogged back and forth through the white pasture, sheep in their arms, over their shoulders. Fíli thought, as faces swam before him and torches blinded his dark-adjusted eyes, that there must be enough of his blood in the ground here now to call this town his own.

The smith would have taken him up, as he had Kíli all those months ago, but for that Fíli wouldn't let go of his brother's shoulders. So the smith's wife tore her skirt and cinched the fabric around his arm – flash of bright pain – as they went, battling back to the village again.

They sat him beside the hearth in the smith's house, and stripped off his wet clothes. Later, Fíli would remember staring at his bare arm as if it belonged to somebody else. It looked like a leg of pork someone had given to a dog. The blood welled to the beat of his heart, ran hot over his skin, stained the rushes on the floor. The pain was a solid thing, now, like a gauntlet he couldn't take off.

The smith's wife knelt beside him and washed his arm with a rag and cold meltwater from the snow; and wrapped it with clean linen and a comfrey poultice so hot it was almost unbearable. Her yellow hair was forced into a tight braid; it shone bright in the firelight. Fíli reached up a hand to touch it. Kíli caught his wrist, and she scowled at him with her onyx eyes.

After she had trussed his arm tight, she gave him a bitter tea in a little pottery cup. It was hot, so he drank it all at once; and blinked, and swayed where he sat. She took the cup out of his hand before he could drop it. Fíli fell sideways, knowing Kíli would catch him before he hit the floor, and drifted down and down through goose feathers into nothingness.

…

When he awoke again, he didn't know where he was. There was a fur over him, thin and moth-holed, and the fire warmth played over his bare skin. Everything, the walls, the roof, the rushes under him, was unfamiliar. 

Beside him, Kíli shifted in his sleep, and as suddenly as if it had never left him, all the memory came back to him at once. He flexed the fingers on his left hand: they responded sluggishly, and his gauntlet of pain throbbed. He looked down at his arm.

The linen was grubby, and brown with blood. Under the dirt and the bandages, his skin looked as pale as if he'd never left the mountains in his life.

With that thought, suddenly he felt the strangeness of everything around him again. He had been right the first time: the house was unfamiliar. The town was unfamiliar. The men were strangers. He glanced at Kíli, sleeping half-against the wall, where he had sat, and saw his mother's face instead of his brother's: her fierce eyebrows, her dark hair, unbound in the morning. The emotion came, driving into his belly like a blade: he wanted his mother, in that instant, more than anything else; wanted her to untangle the braids from his hair and kiss his hurts and bring him honey cakes for breakfast. 

He sniffled, and scuffed his nose with the back of his hand. Then, he took several deep breaths – a needling pain in his side where the wolf had taken him down – and reminded himself that he was a dwarf, not an infant, and what would Thorin think – what would his father think – if they knew he was snivelling over such a minor flesh wound. He cradled his injured arm to himself, drew the fur up over him and lay his head down against Kíli. He didn't sleep again, not until the smith's wife awoke and changed his poultice and bandages without speaking; but he closed his eyes and thought of firelit halls under the mountains, and the song of iron on stone, down in the deeps.

After that night, home memories nagged at him like a biting insect. He didn't tell Kíli, though he could scarce detach his little brother from his side. The snowstorm passed, at long last, leaving the town under foot upon foot of blank white snow. The smith told them, a week after, that on that night, he had taken his shovel back outside, and cleared away the bloody snow, flinging it as far as he could, lest the wolves follow the trail to their door.

The wolves they had killed and left to the forest had been taken to the tanner. They would have the pelts, and the rangy lupine meat. They gave permission, in the end, to feed it to the pigs that belonged to a man across town. He tried to give them coin for it; they refused.

Fíli's savaged arm swelled, despite the poultice, and radiated heat like the forge. The infection made him feverish. He alternately burned and shivered, always sweat-damp, for a week and a half. When he slept, he dreamt of running between the thin black pines, and golden hair whipping in the wind, and whether he was the predator or the prey he never knew. Kíli told him he talked in his sleep – _no_ and _please_ and sometimes _father_ – and Fíli didn't know what to say. 

The infection cleared. Fíli's arm cooled, went down again. The bad dreams stopped. He couldn't work, and he couldn't walk about in the snow, so he paced like an animal in a cage. He annoyed the smith's wife; he sang, anything and everything he could remember; he wrote page after page of Khuzdûl, and guarded them like a dog over a bone – except, of course, from Kíli. (They were full of nonsense. Memories, in no order, from dwarrowhood to yesterday, full of sense impressions. Wolf-dreams. A list of herbs the smith's wife put in the tea she gave him.)

Most of the sheep and lambs had survived. Fíli never found out what had become of the ones he had helped. In an expedition across town, slogging through the snow, he visited the barn where most of the sheep had been removed to, that night. Try as he might, he couldn't tell one sheep from another, let alone the one he and Kíli had rescued.

If they had thought the little gifts from the people of the town after the incident in the summer surprising, they were nothing to what came after the night of the lambing, and the wolves. Some townsfolk left parcels at the smithy, in Kíli's care, with his promise to convey their best wishes to his brother. Some were brave enough to knock at the door of the house and deliver their gifts into Fíli's own hands – or, rather, hand.

There was a neverending supply of sheep's cheese. Hard, crumbly cheese; wet, white cheese; soft, oozing cheese; cheese with blue veins running through it. There were cakes sticky with honey and sprinkled with almond. The pig man made a gift of twenty strips of dried wolf meat, one of which, after a long moment of consideration and some prodding from Kíli, Fíli sunk his teeth into with a strange, macabre sense of triumph. There was a barrel of mead, honey sweet, that was rolled up to their door in the snow one night and left, without a word as to its provenance. And, not long after the wolf night, while Fíli lay restlessly dreaming under his thin fur beside the hearth, a sheep man delivered a sheep's worth of mutton, salted in barrels.

The mutton Fíli didn't eat. He left it for Kíli and for the smith and his wife.

The snowstorms battered the town for week after week. Fíli's arm, slung with linen around his neck, itched as if ants crawled under his skin. He found he had to keep his right hand busy, or he would catch himself scratching it raw. He walked from place to place flexing his fingers, the ache of it making him glare at unsuspecting folk without realising. 

It healed slowly, but it healed. One day, two weeks after the last snowstorm, with the town holding its breath and watching the skies and the snow turning brown underfoot, Fíli woke up to find that the last of the scabbing was gone and his forearm was all livid pink scar tissue. He flexed his fingers, saw the tendons move beneath the skin, and ran a hand over his marred arm. Something almost happiness but not quite rose hot and hard in his throat: satisfaction, maybe.

And he went back to work.

…

It only snowed once more – a drifting down of small flakes that settled soft upon hats and shoulders, like a farewell – before the spring came. The sapping cold retreated, and for a time the earth was damp and cool and calm. Snowdrops blossomed first, pretty nodding white buds under the sheep trough and the bench outside the inn. Then the primroses came, opening in pink and white patches in the grass under the strengthening sun. Then, one pale Sunday morning, when Fíli and Kíli walked idly up to the pine woods for the first time since the snows – wolf memories a thin but present ghost – they found the forest floor violet with bluebells.

It was not long after that when, crossing the road from the smithy in the blue evening dark, Kíli caught Fíli's scarred arm and gripped it, tight. When Fíli turned, Kíli wasn't looking at him. He was staring, dark brows fierce, up, where the road wound away from the town over the grassland to the west. “Look,” he breathed. Fíli looked.

There was a dwarf on the road. It was little more than a charcoal figure in the dusk. They rode a sturdy-legged pony, head down. Fíli, with a migrant's muscle memory, recognised the posture of a long traveller. Fíli reached out, found his brother's shoulder, and held on. “Are they coming from the mountains so soon?” Kíli asked, scarcely more than whispering.

Fíli didn't reply. They waited in the road, holding onto one another like folk watching something cataclysmic approach. The dwarf on the pony came down the road, step by slow step, and into the town. The shock of recognition went through both of them at once. The dwarf rode up to them, every moment larger until he was as large as life, and dismounted, giving his pony a pat on the neck before turning to them and looking them up and down.

“Fíli, Kíli,” Thorin said. If a smile haunted his face for the briefest of moments, it was gone when he said, “I have been looking for you for too long.”


	5. Chapter 5

### 5.

They took him into the inn, and bought him a mug of ale with their wages. The townsfolk were hushed, kept a distance; even the smith did no more than raise his eyebrows at them from his bench. Thorin took them as far from the firelight as they could get, and even there Fíli and Kíli, with senses tuned to the harmony of the town after so many months, could feel the attention of the men like a prickling on the backs of their necks. They exchanged a look, old collusion even more forceful now, in Thorin's presence.

“Your mother,” Thorin began, and already they knew where this was going, “has been worrying herself sick all winter. She expected by the end of autumn at the latest.”

“We know,” Fíli said. Sudden guilt ambushed him, twisting like a knife in his gut. _Their mother_.

Kíli jutted his chin. “We never said we would be home for winter.”

“No.” Thorin brought the full weight of his stare to bear on Kíli, who faltered and looked down. “But you never gave her to believe otherwise.”

Fíli buried himself in his ale. Kíli's brows were knitted, darkly, over glittering eyes. 

Thorin sighed. He leaned back against one of the timbers that held up the roof, and for the first time seemed like a dwarf who had been travelling for weeks. “I understand.” When Fíli and Kíli looked up, he said, “I do. You are growing up. Soon you will be of age. You will be your own dwarves.” It might have been the firelight, or maybe Thorin's expression softened as he looked at his nephews. “You have to choose to do things yourselves, sometimes. Though I never expect you to choose to do things without each other. Frerin and I were the same, once.”

Fíli and Kíli held their breath as one. They could count with one hand the number of times Thorin had mentioned his brother in their presence.

The next moment, the softening was gone, as if it had never been. Thorin glared not at them but through them, as if he were seeing something else, somewhere else. “Which is why I have made a decision.”

“What decision, uncle?” Fíli asked.

Thorin came back to the present. He scowled about, at the inn full of men. “Not now,” he growled. “Not here.”

The evening was less enjoyable than it might have been, but Fíli and Kíli were too much occupied with the suddenness of their uncle's arrival to really feel it. If they had been at home here before, now they were strung taut and quivering with the suggestion of _business_ , of _something new_. Fíli's belly felt treacherous; he couldn't stomach much ale. Kíli drank enough for both of them, fidgeting with nervous energy.

When the night wore on and the townsfolk started to calve off, in ones and twos, to their homes, Fíli and Kíli took Thorin across the road to the smithy. This time of night it was dark and peaceful, iron and steel limned in the red ember glow from the forge. Thorin sat on an anvil, while Fíli and Kíli sat at his feet, staring up at him. It was strange, him here, in this place which had almost been theirs.

“I told you I had made a decision,” he said, voice low. In the forge light, he was all red and black. 

He told them about the quest. The journey; the hardships; the dangers, even before the reached their ultimate goal. It rose up before them in their minds, taller than the sky and blacker than a starless night: the Lonely Mountain. There it lay, at the beginning and end of every story. 

Twining through it all was the thread that everything hung upon: the gold. Their gold. The way Thorin spoke Fíli felt as if he only closed his fist, he would hold it, soft and yellow and bright.

The mountain and the gold. And, guarding them both, the dragon.

When he was done, when he had them, hearts racing and breath quick, he sat back, and said, “And I made a decision, when this map first came into my hands and I knew what had to be done. In the end there was only one choice that I could make.” He looked from Fíli to Kíli, sitting at his feet as they had when they were dwarrows listening to a story. Fíli, wide-eyed and grave-faced; Kíli, thrumming with anticipation. “You are my heirs. Likely as not the only ones I'll ever have. It is proper you should help take back our kingdom. You will be coming with me, on this quest.” Thorin fell silent, and sat back. 

Fíli stared, and felt appropriate emotions trying to penetrate his numbness. Everything Thorin had said – not just now, but for as long as Fíli could remember, all those days and weeks and years coloured with sorrow – seemed to fill his head at once. _A quest_. He closed his fists, opened them again. _Into the wilds_. At last, he did the only thing he could do, the only thing he had ever done: he looked at his brother.

Kíli returned his look, dark eyes candle-bright. Every line of him was alive; he wrote the affirmative with his body, in the language he and Fíli shared. His look pleaded, silently, _yes yes yes yes_.

So Fíli found himself turning to Thorin and saying, “Of course we will, uncle.”

“When do we go?” Kíli asked, inching forward. 

“As soon as you can prepare yourselves,” Thorin said. “Head for Waymeet, on the east road. I'll send word to you there. You're no use to anyone up in these godforsaken hills.”

“Waymeet in the Shire?” Kíli asked, at the same time as

Fíli said, “So soon?”

Thorin looked from one to the other. “Yes,” he said, decidedly. He met Fíli's eyes. “The portents all say the same. There's no time to waste.”

He took a room at the inn, muttering that just because he was a dwarf among men didn't mean he was going to sleep on the floor like a dog. Fíli and Kíli lay down on their bedrolls beside the forge, cradled in the comforting familiar warmth, and stared into the darkness for a long time. At last, Kíli rolled onto his side and propped his head on an elbow, and said, “I wonder who else will be coming.”

Fíli frowned at the ceiling. “Maybe no one. Maybe just us.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” Kíli pillowed his head on his arm, dark hair everywhere. “There'll be loads of us. What dwarf wouldn't want to reclaim the Lonely Mountain?”

Fíli rolled over to face Kíli. There was no doubt in his brother's eyes. “You're right,” Fíli said. And just to try out the words in his mouth: “We'll take back Erebor.” Even as he said it, it sounded like a fairy tale. 

“We will,” Kíli said. His expression demanded faith. Then his face broke in a bright grin. “We'll be princes! Just like Uncle Thorin used to tell us. We'll never have to work another day in our lives.”

“You're just lazy.” Fíli rolled over again, putting his back to his brother.

“Whatever you say, Prince Fíli.”

“Shut up. We need to get some sleep.”

“Yes, Prince Fíli.” Then: “Ow!”

…

Thorin left the next day, in the chill dawn. Fíli and Kíli walked with him to the end of the town, and stood watching as he and his shaggy-furred pony retraced the route they had come the day before, dwindling into the distance until he could no longer be seen. Then they turned to one another where they stood. Thorin left behind him the old familiar dearth: they wished he would stay, despite everything; of course he never would. They scarcely felt it any more.

Now the day stretched before them, unalterably changed from what it would have been only the day before. Already the town, a clutter of quiet houses golden in the sunrise, seemed to draw away from them as if they were already gone. They had been wrong, Fíli thought. It had never been their town, really.

“Best get on with it, then,” Fíli said.

When they told the smith that they would have to leave, he turned away and was silent for a long moment, manipulating a shovel blade onto a wooden handle. At last, he looked up. “Well,” he said. “We couldn't keep you here forever, I suppose.”

“More dwarves will be along in a month or so,” Kíli said.

“It's not like we don't appreciate everything you've done for us,” Fíli said, looking up from under serious brows. “We do. You've done more than we could have ever asked for.” He looked at his feet. “Saved our lives, I expect.”

The smith laid a massive hand on Fíli's shoulder. “Folk don't let folk needing help go unaided. Decent folk don't, anyway.” With his other hand he gripped Kíli's arm, gave it a manly squeeze. “It's been pleasant, having you two around.” He dropped his hands, face clearing. “Now that's the end of me being sentimental. You can finish up your jobs and I'll pay you off. And don't go leaving anything lying about, because I can't promise it'll be here if you come back for it.”

There was still a lot of food from the gifts after the wolf night, including a simply staggering amount of cheese. They left most of it for the smith and his wife, wrapped and stored in barrels where they wouldn't immediately find it. For themselves, they packed the wolf meat, hard black bread, and what remained of the cheese. The knife Fíli had buried in the side of the first wolf had been returned to him, though the one he had dropped from his injured hand was lost, gone to rust in the ground. That evening they spent in the warmth of the smithy, sharpening and oiling their weapons. With every blade sheathed, the reality of the coming trip crystallised, and something a little like excitement fluttered the harder in Fíli's chest.

That night, as they lay in the darkness, Kíli prodded Fíli in the back. “Fíli.”

Fíli swatted him away from the depths of half-sleep.

“Fíli.”

Fíli groaned a long syllable that became “What?”

A quiet full of the noises of Kíli shifting. Eventually: “I lost my bow. Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.” So many months since, Fíli had actually all but forgotten.

More quiet. More awkward fidgeting. Fíli sighed, reluctantly surfacing from half-sleep. He reached behind him, found Kíli's shoulder, and patted him clumsily. “You can have mine.”

Kíli stiffened under his hand. “What?”

“Have my bow.”

“But it's yours. I can't take your bow.”

Fíli groaned. “Please just take it and let me go back to sleep.”

Kíli sighed, short and dissatisfied. Fíli rolled over to face his brother. He gave Kíli a look.

“You're the better bowman,” Kíli said. The want was written all over his face, but it was confused by conscience.

“It doesn't matter. I prefer blades.” Fíli shoved Kíli's shoulder, gently enough that it could be taken as a reassuring touch, if Kíli wanted it. “Just take the bow, will you? Or I'm never doing anything nice for you ever again.”

Kíli rolled his eyes and flopped onto his back, masking everything in adolescent petulance. “Fine.”

Fíli rolled over again, and pulled the blanket up to his nose. “Don't thank me or anything.”

“Thanks.”

“Now go to sleep.”

There was a lot of rolling over and noisy exhalation before Kíli subsided. As Fíli was at last, at last relaxing again into sleep, he thought he heard a very small “Thank you,” from behind him. But he might just have been already dreaming.

…

It took the best part of a week before they were ready to leave. There were always more things to be done. Something forgotten, to be packed; something to be found; jobs to do. The last few days, Fíli found himself working furiously, taking on jobs that hadn't even been his responsibility, as if he could do everything he had meant to do in a fraction of the time.

On the last day, as the sun set red behind the hills and cast the town in a bloody light, they traded the two wolf pelts at the inn for a pair of ponies from the stables. The stable lad grinned at them and nodded at the sky. “You know what they say,” he said. “Red sky at night, shepherd's delight. Should be a fine morning for you tomorrow.”

It _was_ a fine morning, golden clouds streaking a sky of the most delicate eggshell blue, when they at last mounted up. The smith and his wife held the reins, while others – sheep men and market sellers and gaping children – wandered over to pat their ponies' flanks and wish them good luck. Girda stood, shivering in the dawn chill. She was recently engaged to be married to a boy from the next village, but she winked and blew them a kiss each in spite of it.

When the time came, they didn't know how to say goodbye. They shook hands with the smith, one after the other, and bowed their heads to his wife. She smiled – like sun breaking from a cloud – and handed them up a honey cake each, wrapped in brown paper. Then they kicked their ponies into a walk, and the townsfolk parted before them, and they passed through a murmuring of farewells and goodlucks.

They rode on, through the town and up past where the houses stopped, and a signpost fallen askew pointed travellers on to places long since worn from the wood. They followed after Thorin, westerly, at least until they could head south and on to that green and hospitable land called the Shire.

Kíli kept twisting in his saddle to look back. Fíli turned only once: at the crest of the rise where, almost a whole year ago, they had first set eyes upon the town. The road had cleared, now, the folk who had gathered to see them off gone about their business. Back amongst the farewells, Fíli had wanted to say that when they came into their kingdom, the townsfolk would always be welcome; if they ever found themselves east of the Misty Mountains, if they wanted to come visiting. He had bitten his tongue. The people of the town would never come visiting over the Misty Mountains. They would live and die in this place. He would never see them again.

He wondered if he understood at last. He hadn't fit, neither him or Kíli, but not because they were wrong: it was because they were simply bigger than this place. Fíli was sick, sick to his stomach, of trying to be small.

He turned away and nudged his pony forward. “Come on, Kíli.” His brother fell in beside him, ponies matching strides. He wore Fíli's old bow under his pack. It looked right, on him. From nowhere, a grin sharp as a knife spread across Fíli's face. He caught Kíli's eyes. “Let's go and become princes.” He urged his pony into a trot, and, as always, his brother followed.


	6. Coda

### Coda.

After the deaths of her brother and her sons at the Battle of Five Armies, Dís, along with a company of dwarves from Ered Luin, made the long and dangerous journey to Erebor. When she arrived, she was welcomed by Dain Ironfoot and his dwarves as royalty. 

The great halls of the Lonely Mountain were at once achingly familiar and utterly changed. The mountain stank of the dragon's long inhabitation. The immense pillars, the sweeping vaults were all fire-blackened and scarred. But the braziers burning now lit everything in familiar reds and golds, and Dís, so forcefully it near took her breath away, felt her dwarrowhood self walking with her in the halls.

She wore gold in her hair and her beard to see them entombed in the Halls of the Dead. Thorin was allotted a place among the kings of Erebor, beside the empty tombs of his father and grandfather. Her sons were given a place amidst the honoured dead, as heirs who never came into their heritage.

When at last she could be alone, she returned to Thorin's tomb. She had thought she could stand it; but whatever sinews had held her up so long at last snapped, and she screamed at her dead brother and wept and beat her hands bloody on the unyielding stone; she screamed at him for leading her sons to their deaths the way he had led Frerin, the way he had led her husband; and for deserting her now, leaving her alone at the very last. The stone ate the words, and gave nothing back.

When finally she had screamed herself hoarse, screamed her voice away, she turned from her brother's grave to find her sons again. In the smaller hall, she slumped between their tombs and rested her head against the cool stone. She did not know how long she stayed there. At last, she rose again on stiff legs, hands rusty with dried blood, a small, distant part of herself marvelling that she did not just die where she stood. But she didn't die, of course. Her heart went on relentlessly beating, as strong as it had ever been.

Dís went to her rooms and washed the blood from her hands and the tears from her face. Then she took up a pair of shears and cut her hair, down to the dark, uneven crop of mourning. She left the discarded hair where it dropped, gold-heavy. 

Dís remained in Erebor for the rest of her days. Dwalin, so long inseperable from her brother, led what dwarves wanted to go back to the Blue Mountains, and with her blessing took up stewardship of the home that Thorin had built. When at long last, years later, Dís' heart gave up its final fight, she died in the place where she had been born, and she was entombed in the lesser hall beside her sons.

In a village a few weeks' wending walk from the Blue Mountains, the midsummer after the dwarf brothers had left, a woman called Girda gave birth to a baby girl. Her daughter had her mother's soft brown hair. If, when the girl grew up, she was a little shorter and broader (not to mention hairier) than the other girls her age, well, who but her mother thought anything of it?


End file.
